Blogs / Science Not Fiction

On Friday night’s episode of Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition discover a small pod. The pod contains biological material that can be used to replicate a sentient life-form from scratch, should the pod find a planet with the right chemical makeup to provide the raw ingredients. It also contains a cultural and technical database to educate the “Children of the Pod,” and an advanced Artificial Intelligence responsible for guiding the pod to a suitable destination and “birthing” the first generation life-forms. In the real world, with its apparently iron-clad restriction on faster than light travel, this kind of approach is actually one of the leading contenders for how human beings might colonize the galaxy.

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As noted over on 80 Beats, scientists using the Spitzer space telescope have found strong evidence that Epsilon Eridani has a solar system not unlike our own, with rocky planets orbiting in the inner solar system and gas giants orbiting further out.

Science fiction writers must have breathed a collective sigh of relief, as Epsilon Eridani has been used in countless novels, short stories, TV shows, and movies as the location of more-or-less Earth like planets. Nothing dates a science fiction story like the cold hand of reality, such as when Mars was revealed to be a cratered desert with not a canal in sight, or when the clouds of Venus were shown to be concealing a lethal landscape of shattered rock, rather than lush jungle swamps.

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One of my favorite authors (and one of the most scientifically grounded around) is Ben Bova, who has recently published the third book in his trilogy about Mars exploration called Mars Life. The Biology in Science Fiction blog has an interview with Bova, where he talks about the possibility of life on Mars, and why he doesn’t like the idea of terraforming the red planet.

On Tuesday’s nights Eureka, a miniature sun was accidently born in the skies above the town, wreaking destruction. The solution? To shoot iron into the sunlet’s core.

This is in fact not far off how some real stars die: iron poisoning. (more…)

Hot on the heels of last week’s posts about using 100 per cent proof real science in science fiction (Special Relativity in particular), Night Shade Books sent me a copy of Greg Egan’s recently released novel Incandescence. Greg Egan writes what can be called hard space opera. The space opera part comes from the fact that his books are set on a galaxy-sized canvas, and most of his protagonists are members of fantastically advanced civilizations. The “hard” part refers to hard science fiction — the physical laws followed and natural objects found within this type of story are written to be as close to scientifically accurate as possible.

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The hype machine was cranking in Ballroom 20 at Comic-Con this afternoon for Quantum Quest, a 3-D animated feature about “Dave the photon” who leaves the sun to “save his people and save the Cassini spacecraft from the forces of fear and ignorance.”

Clearly, we wish these guys well. Nothing would make us happier at Discover than to have an astronomy movie written by NASA scientists penetrate the public consciousness in some meaningful way.

That being said, we hope they have a good editor, because the amount of information conveyed at this panel was overwhelming.

Here is just a small portion of my notes from the session: (more…)

Improved and expanded laws of robotics [SomethingAwful via BoingBoing]

Living on Martian time [Futurismic]

Singing Mad Scientist Alert: Dr. Horrible comes online today and its pretty frakkin’ good. If only Whedon had the foresight to cast NPH in the Buffy musical.

Revenge of the moped: The future of transport is not the hovercraft, but the electric bicycle. [Next Big Future]

Ahead of our ComicCon panel next week on good science in good science fiction, some musings on the opposite phenomenon: when science fiction hurts good science. [io9, Science Fiction in Biology and Mike Brotherton via SF Signal]

UPDATE: I totally missed the main point of this last story, which was that Buzz Aldrin was the guy who said that popular scifi was hindering science.  Active discussion on the topic going on now at Bad Astronomy.

It slides into view, slowly filling the frame: a giant spaceship, bristling with nacelles, antennas and other devices of unknown purpose. A deep rumbling pushes your sound system’s bass response to the limit. After a length of time, as determined by a complex interplay between how much awe or menace the director is trying to convey and the size of the special effects budget, a collection of glowing engines finally passes into view.

Whether it’s an interstellar freight transport, a Colonial Battlestar, or even a Star Destroyer, one thing is for sure: it’s honkin huge!

By comparison, Earth’s current mega-space project, the International Space Station, is puny. (more…)

In Pixar’s robot love story WALL-E, the Earth is surrounded by a dense field of orbiting junk. (Incidentally, you know you’re a geek when you’re the only one laughing in the cinema because you recognise one of the satellites that WALL-E has to brush out of his way as Sputnik 1.) But while things today aren’t quite as bad as depicted in WALL-E, space debris is still a big problem, as can be seen on a real plot from NASA of the junk orbiting overhead.

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One of my favorite science-fiction movie scenes is the opening sequence of Armageddon, which depicts the asteroid impact that marked the end of The Dinosaur Show. After the impact, hellfire rains down across the globe in deadly, but photogenic, fashion.

But as impressive a visual as that scence is, it is small beans compared to what scientist think might have actually happened to Mars. After sifting through huge amounts of data sent back from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Global Surveyor probes, scientists believe they are closer to an explanation of one of the great puzzles of the solar system: why the northern hemisphere of the planet is so different from the southern hemisphere.

The southern hemisphere is a jangle of ancient and rough terrain. The surface of northern hemisphere is much younger, and one of the flatest places in the solar system. Suggested explanations include the notion that the northern hemisphere is the sea bed of long-vanished ocean, that lava flows from the interior smoothed out the surface, or that it’s actually just a really big crater from a really, really big asteroid.

A new analysis of the shape of the Northern plain that (and this was the hard part) took into account later volcanic action that distorted the outline over the eons has put considerable weight behind the crater theory. This would make Mars host to the largest crater in the solar system and give us new insight into just how dangerous the early solar system was—it’s believed that an even bigger asteroid collided with the Earth, splitting the planet completely open and splashing off gobs of material that later formed our moon.

Lee Billings has an interesting essay in SEED this month on how extraterrestrials would locate Earth from elsewhere in the universe.

“As the probe approached, gaps in the clouds far below revealed continents scattered amidst a world-girdling ocean. In a vast cosmic desert, this was an oasis. The probe sampled the atmosphere, finding abundant oxygen and traces of methane. Chemistry dictates that the two reactive gases could never coexist for long; something was replenishing them. Analyzing starlight reflected off the land, it saw regions absorbing light at wavelengths corresponding to no known non-biological process. Perhaps this was vegetation. The spacecraft also detected powerful, modulated radio emissions from the surface—almost certainly a sign of substantial technology. There was life on this planet, and at least some of it seemed intelligent.”

The probe he’s talking about is the 1990 Galileo spacecraft detecting Earth on its way to Jupiter. No mention of any guideposts set up by the gods or the 12th Cylon, but a fascinating piece nonetheless.